Modern Day Slavery

I met a slave yesterday. I guess I always thought that institutional slavery had been abolished worldwide in the late 19th century, but I stand corrected. I met this modern day slave, a North Korean who goes by Shin, one cold day on the ferry coming back from Russki Island, close to Vladivostok. I was on deck with my video camera, bundled up for the below freezing weather and sea spray and wind. It was only me and a handful of other people on the exterior deck and I noticed this older Asian guy watching me film. When I came close he commented on the scenery in heavily accented Russian. I sat down with him on the splintery bench while he smoked a cigarette and we started talking. He told me he was from Pyongyang, North Korea. When I said I was from America he sparked up a little bit. He talked about his job, wife, son. He pulled out a beat up cell phone and showed me a grainy picture of his wife; he had obviously taken a picture of a picture, and this was all he had. He had not been home in five years. My Korean Samsung video-camera fascinated him. Turning it over in his hands he asked me “are they rich in the South?” The ship docked at the small passenger terminal and lots of passengers emerged from below deck where they had sacrificed the panoramic views of the city for warmth and walls. I hopped down the narrow gangplank and saw Shin walking up ahead, so I ran to catch up with him. It is the first time I have ever talked to a North Korean— first I’ve known of anyone save the few people I know who’ve been to the country itself. It is incredibly uncommon to meet a North Korean abroad, as in, North Koreans outside of the country that are not slave laborers probably number in the hundreds worldwide. I had heard that there were labor camps in Russia where Koreans work, usually deep in the taiga on lumber sites. Shin and I walked to the central square and I asked him if he would be interested in meeting with one of my friends from South Korea. We exchanged numbers and agreed to meet in two weeks. Two weeks passed and Shin called me. I couldn’t meet up that weekend so we moved our get together until the next one. Saturday came and I gave Shin a call. We set the meeting for 5 o’clock in the main square and I made it there a minute or two late. Shin was waiting for me. We stood around for a half hour waiting for my friends Micah and Sewon to come. Another friend of mine, a Spanish guy named Victor, also came and met up with us. He had told me about a Spanish guy who is the only Westerner who works in North Korea. This guy is an official in the North Korean government and conducts all of the cultural relations between North Korea and Europe. He tows the official North Korean line, but is free to travel in between the countries and surely is not subject to the rations, intimidation, etc. Micah and Sewon came and we walked to a nearby restaurant. Sewon and Shin broke off into Korean and hung back from us chatting away. We stood in the line at the buffet style restaurant and I encouraged Shin to get whatever he wanted, it was on us of course. He loaded up his plate and we went to sit. With Sewon there, it was much easier to speak with Shin, as his Russian is pretty limited (though surprisingly good, since I’m sure he has had no formal education). We asked him about life in North Korea and were shocked to hear what he had to say. Of course, everyone knows that the North Korean regime is evil, but it is much different to see the face of oppression. Shin’s story: Shin was born in North Korea and lived in Pyongyang. He was forced to join the army when he was 17 and served the mandatory 10 years, building bombs as part of his service. He told us that there was not enough food. After leaving the army at age 27, he had to find some kind of work before being allowed to marry. He married his wife at age 30 and they have two boys. One of the boys serves in the army and the other is still in school. His wife works in a window factory. He had been picked in some kind of raffle to work abroad. It is apparently a highly sought after opportunity to work outside of the country, even though the conditions are truly terrible. He showed us his passport: full of communist insignia with a notice on the last page saying exactly how many pages were in the passport and special anti-counterfeit numbers on each page so that there was no way to leave. Shin told us that their Russian bosses will sometimes steal their passports and return them only if they are paid. Shin has been living in Vladivostok for 7 years and has not been home in 5. He is allowed one letter a week home and no phone calls. Needless to say, there is no skype or email. He said that people escape every once in a while, but that it is a death sentence to their families. Still, some cannot take it after seeing the outside world and being in a real position to flee. The North Koreans all live together in an apartment somewhere far outside of town. Sixteen people to one room and there is no kitchen. The “company,” which is state owned, collects 100% of the wages and then gives back just enough so that the men can buy a little bit of food. There are some meals provided by the company, but Shin said that they are terrible. We finished our dinner and Shin still had half a plate of food. Apparently he didn’t like the Russian food. I thought it was strange since he has been here for 7 years, but then I realized that he has probably not eaten Russian food at all. The Koreans stay among themselves and have no money to go anywhere or try anything new. Russians could care less about migrant laborers, especially ones from a poor and backwards country like North Korea. We went upstairs to the bar and ordered a round of beers. Shin was really excited for beer. Without any money to buy alcohol, the Korean laborers will sometimes purchase raw ethanol and mix it with water if they want to celebrate. Shin said that in North Korea only rich people (people in the government or high level military) can drink, everyone else makes homemade wine out of grapes. Shin reveled the beer; it was something completely out of the ordinary. He told us that he loved Vladivostok and said that he was most surprised by the way women here dress: scantily. While we waited for Sewon to translate we all joked that he was probably most surprised by the beautiful women here. Guys are the same everywhere I guess. He said that Vladivostok was much better than North Korea, though he missed his mother, wife, and children bitterly. We asked if he thought there was any hope for the country with the new leader, the son of Kim Jong Il. Shin shook his head. This is the son, nothing will change. He became depressed and he and Sewon broke off in Korean for a while. We are curious, but this is another person’s reality. This is the life of their family. .p2 p {text-indent: 25px;} Shin borrowed Sewon’s phone so that he could call his boss to tell him he would be home late. If he missed the role call, there would be punishment. Grown men with a curfew, and if they violate it they owe money. Of course, they don’t have any money, so it likely means that they will be put on a starvation diet for a few days as punishment. We ordered another round of beers and bought some dried fish to snack on. Shin said he was so happy to have found new friends and said that he would happily be my colleague. He told me that if I find a good girl I should love her with all my heart. We told him how glad we were to have met him. Shin was hoping to head home for the New Year, the first time he would hold his wife and sons for five years. But, he doesn’t know if he will have the money to go home. It maybe be another lonely New Years anonymously wandering the main square near the statues of partisans for Soviet power, attracting the suspicious stares of Russians who say that there are too many Asians here. We walked Shin to his bus. He was not sure if he had time catch the second bus that would take him 45 minutes into one of the neighborhoods to his Spartan barracks. Micah bought him a pack of cigarettes and we said goodbye, promising that next time we would take him for Korean food. After he left, Sewon mentioned that he had tried to get close to her. She wasn’t uncomfortable, just found it strange. Five years without female contact, I imagine that having a pretty young Korean girl take interest in his story must have been wrenching for him in a way that probably only men can understand. A desperation for physical, emotional, sexual contact that overwhelms, depresses, excites. I cannot help but wonder whether we put Shin in danger. There is no doubt that talking to foreigners, especially Americans and South Koreans (with whom North Korea is still at war officially), is strictly forbidden. I know for a fact that speaking about the North Korean regime is a punishable offense. Friends I have who have been to North Korea were made to sign a contract saying that they would not speak about the trip afterwards. Of course, no one listens. But, for Shin, he has to go back someday. He is still subject to their laws, their crazy whims. What if someone were to find out? Was he endangering himself and his family for a few beers and a free dinner? Or, was it for a taste of freedom, of friendship? Breaking the bonds of slavery for a few short hours?

Russky Island

A sturdy ferry by the name of Vladimir Rodik makes the fifty-minute trip out to the sparsely inhabited Russky Island every couple of hours. Although the island is now connected to the mainland by an massive cable-stayed bridge, which cost about $1 billion to build, the majority of the inhabitants live on a part of the island not serviced by the bridge. To get to this part of the island, it is still necessary to take the ferry. I paid the 43 rubles (about $1.30) for my passage and stood out on the deck as we sailed off into the Gulf of Peter the Great. The entire waterfront is a rotting industrial landscape. The capacity of the port is laughably small, with old fashioned cranes that would be incapable of servicing the types of large container ships that even we receive at home in Charleston, South Carolina. Indeed, the ships moored in the harbor were all tiny. Of course, the population of Vladivostok is about the same size as Charleston’s, but for a port city that sits right between the Asian powerhouses of Japan, China, and Korea, the port seems tremendously underutilized. From a distance, Vladivostok looked like a city crammed into too little space, the air above it hazy with pollution and the buildings wedged in like boxes of cereal in a supermarket. The two new bridges stand as modern giants against the otherwise unremarkable cityscape. Still, the city is beautiful for its location on a hilly peninsula with views of gulf from every hilltop. The ferry carved through a narrow inlet that then opened up into an enormous interior cove, surrounded by the heavily forested hills of the island. We motored past a crumbling concrete pier where fishermen had congregated around a beached trawler.

We docked at the pier and the passengers rushed down the swaying wooden gangway and onto the shore. There was nothing around except for the shabby passenger terminal and a billboard slapped up against an abandoned building advertising “Brooklyn Pizza.” A decrepit concrete staircase curved up the side of the hill and into a forest. I followed a few people up and after a minute of two came out into a block of residential apartments with laundry hanging from the windows and little girls playing in a flooded playground. A little farther on I found an old industrial site where Central Asians were living in little wooden cabins. I continued down the road and passed a few country homes with old women in headscarves working the dirt or walking with buckets of water from the communal well. A few children were riding bikes up and down the road, dodging the odd stray dog. A tall green stretch of sheet metal fenced off the territory of a monastery. The golden dome of an Orthodox church glittered over the top. I came to the front gate, pulled the chain handle down and walked inside. I was immediately greeted by a middle-aged woman in a plaid shirt whose shoulders came almost up to her ears because of her painful hunch. Monks were running to and fro cutting wood and feeding the cows. A calf was tied up away from his mother and was bellowing loudly until the bearded black-robed monk came with the feed bucket. Inside the church a christening was going on. I stood and watched at the door as the priest raddled off by rote in the old church-Slavonic. The little boy stood with his father, looking around a bit nervously at all of the old monks with their long scraggly beards and funny costumes.

On the far end of the bay I came upon a deserted factory with the year 1940 written in a light-colored brick above the main building. At the main gate a stray dog scared me off. I don’t think it was a mean dog, but I have become rather nervous around dogs on old industrial sites because sometimes they are really trained to attack. I kept my distance and found another way in through the rusty sheet metal fence, which had large sections torn away. Stepping through, I noticed a big carpet of wet insulation, which was probably asbestos. I made sure to step around it, though I am hoping that the particles would be pinned down when wet.

Before long I started heading back to the pier to catch my ferry. On the way, I passed a girl who was leading her horses down to the beach. With time to kill, I leaned up against an overturned boat and read a book. There was a Russian sauna nearby and every once in a while men would run outside and jump into the water. A woman with her small daughter started cursing at one naked man, but he just laughed it off and said “I’m not trying to show her.” Russians have a more lax attitude towards public nudity. I slept in the lower passenger deck on the way back. A cold had been coming on all day and I was exhausted by the time I got back into town. But, it was a day well worth it.

Хабаровск (Khabarovsk): The Tidiest City in Russia

Khabarovsk recently received accolades for being the tidiest city in Russia, and it’s true that the city is unique in Russia for being almost entirely devoid of beer bottles and empty chip bags lining the curbs or tossed into the grass. In fact, it is a beautiful city, at least as beautiful as the relatively new Far-Eastern-communist cities get. The main road is the usual Russian hodgepodge of art-nouveau imported from Western Europe at the pleasure of the Tsar, smushed in with turn of the century red brick buildings with decorative masonry in a style unique to the period in Russia. And then, of course there are the typical low-rise blockhouses with their rusting porches and grey-on-grey concrete and mortar facades. Perhaps not so common was the fairly high number of experimental-constructivist buildings. While still extremely ugly, these mammoths break up the monotony with their mid-century socialist-optimism represented in the odd lines, radical curves, overhung shoulders and concave waistlines of their sturdy steel anatomies. I left the southerly Vladivostok in shorts and arrived in Khabarovsk to find the leaves changing with Autumn. The smell of the season hung over the city. The decaying of last spring mixing with the cold air coming in from the northwest made less a smell than a general sensation that transported me back to Thanksgivings in childhood. It is funny how the sun in the afternoon, the season, the smells, the wind can all swell your emotions and send your mind home, even here 6,800 miles away. We had spent the night on the train in the budget wagon, “platzcart.” My friends Maika and Sewon (American and Korean) were a bit anxious for their first trip on Russian trains, especially as their trust in me as navigator and guide had been shaken when we missed our first train. The problem is that the trains in the East are all scheduled on Moscow time, meaning the departure time will read 1:00 p.m. but really mean 8:00 p.m. Vladivostok time. Thanks to my poor math we had to pay to switch to a later train. Our tickets weren’t together so I went to my bed and feel asleep. The next morning I woke with the train still moving and became acquainted with my neighbors: an older Russian lady and two Uzbek guys. The Uzbek guys were unwrapping a big fish from a bundle of newspaper and one of them asked me for a knife to cut it up with. I gave it to him and he cut the fish up into segments, handing me one with a cup of beer.

I had bananas so I offered one to the Uzbek who spurned it, telling me that it was “not real food.” I was eating plain black bread and he asked me if I wanted some “preserves,” which I took to mean fruit jelly. Instead, he pulled out a fat can of beef and bent my knife trying to open it. The beef was suspended in solid fat. I tried to pick it out but it was an impossible task. I cut my finger taking the knife out of the sleeve. The Uzbek guy grabbed a role of toilet paper from his bunk and sat me down to make a bandage. We arrived in Khabarovsk, the Uzbeks gave me hearty handshakes goodbye and one of them handed me the fish head wrapped in newspaper as a token of our new friendship. I carried the fish head around for an hour or two but it ended up in the trash because I couldn’t find any stray cats. We were staying with a Russian couple, Lesya and Yura, who lived in a nice one room flat near the center of the city. They had a hairless sphinx cat named Tiffany who jumped around the room like a naked rat with dangly tits. Sewon was scared of her but I really liked the cat because she was sociable and would stand on my shoulder like a parrot, scrunching up her face like a normal cat, just with no hair! We took in the city by foot, eating street food and browsing the outdoor souvenir shops selling trinkets that had “Moscow” written on them. Down along Amur river the wind was whipping us and I was glad that I brought my winter jacket. From the boardwalk we could see a line of smokestacks and cooling towers exhaling black smoke over the river. That night we spent with our hosts and Maika got tremendously drunk on cheap vodka. He and I ended getting into a semi-playful slapping fight that then morphed into a rant and had both of us pissed off. The next morning he didn’t remember any of it but apologized nonetheless. Sunday and the sky was a pure blue canvas. We spent the hours before our train left in the Lenin square watching little kids roller-skate and talking about the political paradigms of steppe cultures. Typical conversation with Maika.

Our hosts accompanied us to the train station and helped us find the Moscow to Vladivostok train. I was sitting apart from the other two again but quickly became acquainted with my neighbors: an old Russian couple (Sasha and Natasha) and a Kyrgyz man (Misha) in his 50’s. The trio had been together on the train for 5 days already and made me feel very welcomed into their little community. The Russians were interested to hear all about America and to tell their kids that they had met and talked with a real American right there on the train. The Kyrgyz guy was silent at first, but started to open up when I started talking about American politics and economics. He was tremendously knowledgeable about all of it, spouting out figures along with personal predictions about American public finances and the upcoming election. The conversation moved to politics and religion, as it always will when in good company. Here the Kyrgyz informed me that he was a communist. This didn’t surprise me much as his intelligence and education was easy to surmise. He had studied in Kiev and had become a member of the party, which was really no easy feat. Before long Misha was rummaging through his bags and showing off the U.S. Marine Corps uniform he had gotten from a relative who works at the U.S. base near Bishkek. Then he pulled out two bottles of Kyrgyz cognac, a few bags of homemade raisins and apricots, and some toasted apricot pits that I had never tried before. We had shot after shot of cognac and made numerous toasts to our meeting, new friendship, future health, and friendship of nations.

Georgia

All things considered, Georgia is the coolest place I’ve ever been. It’s like a 13th century Europe with a pinch of communist ideology and a twist of mountain culture that is overtly welcoming but with an almost vitriolic current flowing somewhere beneath. The food is some combination of Indian spices and sauces with the fresh herbs and light vegetable dishes of Levantine cooking, resulting in a cuisine unparalleled in flavor and incomparable to any other food I’ve ever tasted. It is hands down my favorite food in the world. Dry wine growing lands give way to rocky foothills and fast flowing streams that swell in the spring with the snowmelt. The northern borderlands are formed by the desolate peaks of the Caucasus Mountains where the snow remains all year like icing on some wild spine of the earth. I landed in Tbilisi around midnight and found a taxi to take me to an address that I had scrawled on a piece of notebook paper. The driver dropped me off in a square where I found some more taxi drivers and asked to use one of their cellphones to call my couchsurfer host, an Estonian named Mirja. Thanking the drivers with my single word of Georgian (genatsvale), I stood outside on the curb for her to come. Back at her apartment I had a few hardboiled eggs before collapsing on the couch. The next morning I got up early because Mirja said I couldn’t hang around in the morning as her roommate wasn’t so keen on having a stranger in the house, even one so endearing as me. I headed out into the city and decided to hike to the top of a mountain overlooking Tbilisi. I picked a spot on the mountain and took what seemed like the best route through the cobblestoned alleys up the hill. I walked up until I was above all of the houses and from there I found a well tread dirt path heading to the top. The air in Georgia is clean and free of industrial pollutants, which makes it unique in the former Soviet world. At this high altitude the sun beat down especially hard and I was feeling the tips of my ears and nose starting to redden under the celestial broiler overhead. I stripped down and bathed in an icy spring that was trickling forth from some crevice in the side of the mountain. On the way up I found a makeshift gym situated in a grove of trees. I did a few chin ups and dropped down with my hands covered in rust. There was a bench press where the weights were two car rims welded to steel rebar. They had this sort of outdoor gym in Kiev as well where big Ukrainians would go and lift old car parts.

On the way back down I stopped at an old church up on the hill. The good thing about churches is that they are always cool in summer and always warm in winter. I walked around the territory and started to walk down into what was apparently someone’s back yard when some funny looking bearded guy yelled at me not to go there. I retreated back saying I was sorry and the guy noticed that my Russian was a bit funny so we started chatting. He ended up giving me a ride back down into town with his wife and infant daughter. That night I met up with Mirja and some of her friends (two Germans, and a Spanish guy) and we all had an excellent, delicious, fantastically tasty meal at a hole-in-the-wall Georgian cafe. After that we went to someone’s apartment to watch football and get drunk. Mirja ended up traveling with me around Georgia quite a bit. After a day or two we went to a town called Kazbegi high up in the Caucasus Mountains about 3 hours north of Tbilisi. Mirja and I crammed into the very back seat of a minibus where we didn’t have a view out of the window. Squeezed in next to us were a group of Peace Corps volunteers and a British guy named Mashood (he was half Ugandan, quarter Pakistani, quarter Iranian). When we pulled into Kazbegi there were a bunch of locals hanging around the little bus stop with signs advertising their guesthouses. An old man came up to me and asked “English?” as he flipped through a worn out notebook to a page where some former guest had written a little description of his house for future clients. I had read about one of the ladies who was standing out there so we decided to stay with her along with the group of peace corps guys. Mirja and I stood out on the road as the owner’s son ferried the others to the house and then came back to pick us up. The guesthouse was really just the home of a family who vacated their beds when people showed up. We slept in their beds and they slept in the living room on couches. The grandmother worked out in the garden during the day, the high peaks a beautiful backdrop. The older son was a border guard and the other was around my age and worked at home. The older one spoke neither Russian nor English save for a few words like “devushka” ([young] girl), “America,” “Russia,” “Putin,” “Obama,” and “M-16.” But, he was very talkative and would say these words over and over again in creative combinations, so a conversation was something like: “devushka, America, Obama (thumbs up and smiling). Russia, Putin (sticks out his tongue and shakes his head in disapproval).” I spoke quite a bit with the grandmother and one of the sons in Russian. The younger son said that I was one of the only guests to have ever talked with them beyond just asking, “where are the towels?” The food at the house was decent, but a bit less spectacular than the restaurant food. Georgians usually just eat fried potatoes at home and save the really good stuff for special occasions. We hiked up to some ancient stone church perched high up over the city. The going was steep and I slipped a few times, but the view up top was fabulous. On the backside of the hill a mini glacier had formed where a big water hose was spewing out high-pressure mist. I climbed down to the now melting glacier and tried to fill up a water bottle with the clean melt, but I came back soaked as the wind changed and sent the mist my way. Mirja and I got a bit bored with the Peace Corps folks who were none of them too enamored by the country after living in impoverished villages and being hassled by locals for 2 years. Mirja and I were glad when we ran into Mashood and his Georgian friend walking through the village and invited them to come along with us up to the Russian border. We hired two drivers to take us along the dramatic mountain road to the border with Russia to have a look. A monastery was being built on the Georgian side, a masterpiece of churchy kitsch. These kinds of buildings are beautiful when they are 1000 years old, but a new stone monastery looks like it belongs at Disney World even if it is done tastefully. The border was uneventful so we went back. From the village Mirja, Mashood, the Georgian guy decided to hike up to a waterfall near one of the neighboring villages. We took the gravelly path across a boulder-strewn field where hundreds of cows were grazing. After about an hour of hiking and wondering where this waterfall was, we flagged down a passing car and asked for a ride. The Georgian guys driving didn’t say a word to us the whole time, but just stared on at the road as if picking up an American, Estonian, and Brit were something they did every day. I thanked them as they drove off with my one word of Georgian. At this, our Georgian friend started laughing and he explained to me that this word, genatsvale, while loosely translating to “thank you,” actually has a much stronger meaning. It is a word of tremendous thanks and connotes something like “I am so thankful that I take your burdens and sins onto myself.” Some strong religious imagery. I had been using this word to thank shopkeepers when they handed me my change, so I felt kind of silly. The waterfall was fantastic and from the top we held a vantage point of a neighboring village and huge mountains.

On the way back to Kazbegi we tried hitchhiking again. First I tried to flag a car and then Mashood tried, but no one stopped. Then we prodded Mirja to try and what do you know, the first car stopped! We hopped in the back and the driver drove on and didn’t say a word to us. When we came up to town the road was blocked off because president Sakashvili was apparently coming through. Our driver was cursing him as we climbed out to walk the rest of the way. We shared a taxi back to Tbilisi with Mashood and the Georgian guy. On the way back we stopped to help an older man whose car had broken down on the side of the road. Our driver climbed out and started looking down at the other guy’s engine as men tend to do whether they know anything about cars or not. Before long our Georgian friend hopped out and then so did I. We decided that we would have to push the car up to the next town, so we dug in and pushed. First up the hill and then down with the old guy steering. That night in Tbilisi I met up with another couchsurfing host named Robin. He was from New Zealand and lived in a luxury apartment in downtown Tbilisi. Robin was in charge of a lot of the legal work for a bunch of international corporations operating in Georgia, Armenia and Azerbaijan. Basically, he was a big shot bachelor who thought it’d be fun to host some traveling folks and show them a good time. And that he did. Robin and I had an early dinner at some Georgian place not far from his house. An American girl came and met up with us to eat, Robin called her “Babs,” and she said she had taught English in Iraq for a while. We had a pretty good time drinking beers and vodka at the restaurant. I ended up doing most of the ordering in Russian because Robin doesn’t really speak Georgian. The next day I got up and met Mirja again and we headed to Stalin’s birth town, Gori. At the end of Stalin Avenue sits the house where Stalin lived as a child. Behind it is a palatial museum, erected during his lifetime I think. However, we had come on Orthodox Easter, so the museum was closed. Even the giant statue of Stalin had been ripped out of the ground- for renovation. We hiked up to the top of a hill overlooking Gori where some castle ruins remain. There was a sort of cellar structure remaining, but as I climbed down into it I noticed a weird stench. On the ground there was lots of bunched up paper and it wasn’t long before I realized that I was walking around in human feces. Mirja and I climbed around on some enormous bronze statues of armored soldiers down at the base, and then went into a neighboring cathedral to watch some Easter goings on. We found a taxi to take us outside of town to this ancient city carved into sandstone. The rooms and halls of this palatial underground complex had all been exposed after an earthquake a few centuries ago. It had lain in ruins for years until a few years ago when someone up top realized the obvious potential for tourism. Now the place is well set up with lots of handrails and wooden stairs. Still, the modern stuff doesn’t really detract since the place is so spectacular in its own right.

From Gori, Mirja was heading back to Tbilisi and I was going on to Mestia in the Svaneti region. But, since I had lots of time to kill and didn’t want to spent hours by myself in the rather dull city of Gori, I changed my ticket and took the local train back to Tbilisi with Mirja. The local train was absolutely packed and there was no sitting room left so Mirja and I stood in the aisle crammed in with a bunch of Georgians and a few friendly Iranians, as it so happened. The Georgians were infatuated with Mirja since she is tall, fare, and blonde. One soldier guy was really talking with her a lot in spite of his very broken English. I think he was asking her what the patron saint of her city was. In the Georgian Orthodox tradition people visit the graves of relatives and have a big picnic with lots of homemade wine. On our holiday train back to the city people started to pass around cups of wine and apples, so we happily imbibed. An old man next to us pulled out an accordion and started playing some American blues. Back in Tbilisi Mirja and I ate at a café where we were ripped off because we are foreigners and speak no Georgian— typical experience. We said our goodbyes and I went to go catch my train. I was exhausted and went right to sleep on the tiny bed in the stifling little sleeper car. I woke up covered in sweat as we were pulling into the town of Zugdidi, from which I would find a little bus to make the 6-hour drive to the remote Svaneti region. I came out of the train station and asked a police officer where I could find the bus. I found the bus and asked the driver when we would be leaving. He told me we would head out as soon as the bus filled up- about eight seats. It was 7 a.m. so I went to go find some breakfast. There was an open-air market up the street so I headed that way. I stopped to use the pay bathroom where I saw an old man taking a big shit in a squat toilet with no door. Having more or less lost my appetite, I went to browse the bookseller stalls and bought a Russian learning book for Georgian speakers. Back at the bus station I sat around waiting and trying to take a nap. A skinny guy who looked a little like Al Pacino in Scarface except much more pathetic was already drunk when he showed up at 9 a.m. He sat in the front seat sipping on homemade liquor and kept turning up the radio. The driver would come and turn it down and yell at him, and then he would turn it back up, and the whole game continued for hours. A Russian mother and son from Yekaterinburg showed up and the drunk Georgian started talking to them in Russian and telling them how great Vladimir Putin is and what an American puppet Sakashvili is. After a while I chimed in and told him I am an American, to which he started ranting at me in slurred-drunk-Georgian-accented Russian. Around noon we started off towards Mestia, but now before we loaded up the back of the little bus with boxes of dry goods to deliver. The driver was hauling along the narrow mountain roads, we passengers all bumping up and down and sliding into one another on the sharp turns. We had to dodge big boulders in the road fairly often, which made one think what would happen if one of those boulders came loose as we were passing. That and the cows in the road. But, the windows were open and the air was cool, so I was happy the whole way up. Georgia feels old, maybe even ancient. In the remote Svaneti region locals live in stone houses dating from around the turn of the last millennium and trudge up the muddy hillside in soiled smocks. The water from the sink is always running as it is fed by a spring from further up the mountain. At the house where I was staying I was served fresh milk each morning from the cow in the backyard and bread baked in the wood stove that heated the kitchen. I stayed with Svans, a Georgian people with a different language and culture. The woman spoke some basic English, her aunt spoke a bit of Russian, and her uncle and brother spoke only Svan.

The men spent the day working wood as per their profession. The house was full of elaborately carved furniture, all hand made in the shed up front. To reach the house you have to walk on a couple of logs over a swiftly flowing stream, all with a cow or goat looking at you and the two little dogs barking. I took a walk around the territory, which stretched up onto the side of the mountain. I saw the uncle and brother and stopped to help them shovel manure into a wooden sled that was being pulled by a horse. Horned cattle wandered the streets of the town, stopping and staring at the odd human passerby. Mestia is the capital of the Svaneti region, which is notable for its centuries old stone defensive towers (built mostly in the 9th-12th centuries) attached to most homes in town. I heard some other Georgians joking that the Svans built the towers not to protect against invaders, but to protect themselves from one another. The Svaneti region is home to the highest inhabited place in Europe, the village of Ushghuli, which is only reachable by off-road vehicle (and usually not in Spring on the muddy roads) or by four day hike. The Soviets didn’t come to Svaneti region until the 1960’s and tourists didn’t start flowing in until the mid 2000’s when the incoming president Sakashvili sent in army troops to kill the bandits who routinely terrorized and robbed tourists and locals alike at the point of sub-machine guns. There was a shoot-out in which the leader of the bandits and his two sons were killed. Like the rest of rural Georgia, Svaneti was essentially lawless until the ascension of Sakashvili who has brutally and speedily modernized the country. Perhaps too brutally as he just failed to be re-elected thanks in part to some leaked videos of prison guards beating inmates and sodomizing a guy with a broom. Georgia has one of the highest per-capita prison populations in the world, but also one of the lowest crime rates in Europe (on par with Holland or Switzerland). With Sakashvili came a rapid economic modernization and a complete purge in the government and police force to get rid of corruption. This was all heavily assisted by the American and European cash and credit. The signs of this money are very visible with new police stations in every little town and a big new highway named in honor of George W. Bush. In terms of resources, Georgia has relatively little to offer itself. Its value to the U.S., and more particularly to Europe, is its geographic position as a gas corridor. The position is fabulous for two reasons: 1) it is close to gas-rich Turkmenistan; 2) it bypasses Russia and Iran. Basically, Europe is incredibly anxious a out being so dependent on Russia for its natural gas consumption and it is desperately trying to diversify away from the screwy Russian state-monopoly supplier. Turkmenistan offers an alternative if a pipeline can be constructed through the Caspian Sea, into Azerbaijan, then Georgia, then Turkey, and into Europe. Russia is vehemently opposed to this, as the construction of this pipeline would be the kiss of death to state-monopoly Gazprom, who is already struggling on many different fronts. Russia stands to stop the construction of a pipeline by force, using its status as a Caspian Sea border state to conjure up some pretext for intervention.

For the time being, the Caspian pipeline is off the table. The 2008 Russo-Georgian war solidified this, probably at least for the next decade. The U.S. is unlikely to throw its full weight behind Georgia and the pipeline for fear of becoming embroiled in a Caucasian-Caspian conflict over European gas, especially as American shale gas stands to enter the European gas scene in a big way. Back in Svaneti, I was trying to find things to do in the cold and drizzly weather. I took a few hikes into the mountains and one time came up to some kind of camp that was being guarded by two kids with AK-47’s. I walked up to them, which I think they found rather surprising, and we had a time of it since they spoke neither Russian nor English. It was quickly understood however that I couldn’t go along any further to the little encampment where older men were playing volleyball and having a picnic. Up the road a bit from where I was staying was a brand new wooden chalet with a guard perched up on the driveway. I had been told that this was Sakashvili’s vacation house and I asked the guard whether it was true. He gave a non-committal answer, which basically confirmed it. A few days by myself in Svaneti with bad weather and I was feeling a little lonely and bored. I had read about a charter plane that sometimes flies back and forth between Tbilisi and Mestia, so I walked down to the airport to find out about it. They told me that the plane would probably be flying the next day if the weather held up. The next morning I called down to the airport and heard that they would be taking off. The brother gave me a ride down to the runway where I bought my ticket from the cute girl. A Canadian company owns the plane and the pilots were two tall blonde Canadians. I was in the plane with a family of Georgians and their kids, all babbling on in Georgian. The pilot turned around and hung out of the cockpit and gave the safety presentation: “welcome aboard, exits are behind you, put on your seatbelts.” The propellers started whirring and we were taking off over the stone towers of Mestia. From the air, Mestia looked like something out of Lord of the Rings, an embattled settlement perched high up in the mountains with the locals going about with their daily subsistence. The flight was about an hour long and we stayed low enough to not be pressurized. We flew right through the peaks, the pilots navigating entirely by sight. At times we passed just a few hundred feet above the snowy crags. The plane came out of the mountains after a rather jerky half hour. Heading for Tbilisi, a rolling emerald landscape stretched out like a doormat to the Caucasus, dotted by the occasional farmer’s field. Back in Tbilisi I took a taxi back down George W. Bush highway and headed to another couchsurfer’s house. I stayed the night with this really nice German couple who were both medical students. They rented the bottom floor of a Georgian family’s house. We told the Georgian family that I was a cousin visiting from America. I spent the next night at Robin’s apartment again and we had a good time drinking beers out on his balcony overlooking downtown Tbilisi. We talked about politics, his two Hungarian ex-wives, and the path a young man might take in life.

First impressions of Vladivostok.

The first few days arriving in a new place are always a rather lonely period of adjustment as you try to make good first impressions and find the right people to spend time with. There’s a small window of opportunity to brand yourself, so to speak, so that you aren’t pigeonholed into a crowd with no good-looking girls and weird guys with a really bad sense of humor. Luckily, my social bone has served me well (or maybe it’s the good looks) and I’ve fallen in with all of the Americans in the group and met a lot of Russians, most of whom I like a lot. Vladivostok is a pretty whacky city because it’s way out by Japan and Korea and has the same kind of mountain terrain and spindly flora that I always picture being in China. It still feels like Russia but with a few exceptions. Firstly, I’ve seen pretty few Soviet cars. In their place people drive used Japanese imports with steering wheels on the right side. Vladivostok was the source of almost all foreign cars in Russia east of the Urals, which is where most of the wealth in the city came from. Recently, a big tax was slapped on imported cars which has really hurt the industry and which brought about big protests that the Kremlin had to put down with special police flown in from Moscow. Secondly, you can find really great Asian food here. Even in Moscow- the biggest city in Europe- it was almost impossible to find decent ethnic food at prices that weren’t absolutely cost prohibitive. The last Chinese place in Russia that I ate in had sweet-and-sour chicken that as breaded in doughnut batter to make it more suitable to the Russian palate (not very sophisticated if you ask me). Because of its proximity to China (5 hours by bus) and Korea (the North’s border is about 100 miles from here), lots of unskilled Asians flow in and do what they do best: open restaurants! The other night we ate at a Korean restaurant with one of our Korean friends. She spoke with the waitress in Korean and told us that the girl was obviously from North Korea (based on the dialect). There is also (allegedly) a North Korean restaurant owned and operated by the North Korean government. I’ll try it out and report back. I thought I’d escaped dormitory life after I finished by first year of college, but no such luck. Six guys share our shower and toilet, though there is no hot water at the moment so no one is showering too much. My roommate, Yaroslav, is a bit of a Russian redneck. He is constantly spraying cheap cologne in the room, playing shoot-em-up video games, putting on bad techno remixes of bad pop songs, and heading to the club. He shines his tennis shoes before he heads out. But, he’s a nice guy and I like him. Yesterday some friends and I went out for dinner and bumped into this drunk ex-cop who bought us all rounds of vodka and told us about how he had gotten drunk with a few American sailors three years ago. I had the best Russian of our group so I was stuck translating everything he was saying, which was interspersed with “…whore…bitch…” every few seconds (those are some of the worst swear words in Russian). It was kind of funny except for his wife who was also sitting with us had bruises all over her arms (a few of which probably came from intravenous drug use, but the rest probably from being slapped around by her hulking toothless husband). The whole time this guy is rambling, the waitresses were looking at us to ask ‘is everything ok?’ We were having a fine time though. There was a family sitting behind us with small kids, so I felt a bit bad that this guy was speaking so filthily. After he left I apologized and the small boy asked me “aren’t you on TV?!” I had to tell him no.

In the Countryside

Valentina and I left her apartment in time to catch the 9:30 bus to Suzdal. My host mother had laden me down with bags full of pie and chicken. We walked to the bus station, passing the spot where a former Russian Olympian had been killed by a drunk driver a few years back. With the summer solstice not long past, the morning sun was high already. Inside the bus the temperature was already mounting. We sped past old women selling cups of berries on the side of the road, wide open fields like the ones I’ve seen in pictures of the Midwest. Tall grass and wildflowers blanketed the smooth waves of earth with only the occasional grove of fir trees to break up the vast stretches of land. Bright bulbous church domes cropped up on the horizon and Valentina was trying to recall which centuries they were built in. In front of a couple of trailers a cluster of proletarians stood waiting for buses. Here we met Valentina’s friend, Marina, and Marina’s daughter’s boyfriend, Dima. Marina had been a coworker in the factory back in Soviet times. The factory had employed several thousand people before the collapse of the USSR, but now only a few hundred employees remain. Marina’s father was waiting on us in his old Lada. As we approached the car his face lit up in a metallic smile, gold upper incisors and canines shining out between a few greyed natural teeth, the less prestigious lower incisors mostly done in silver. The old man, Yuri Ivanovich, laughed and sang playfully as he drove down the rutted roads farther and father away from the town. Marina kept asking me whether I understood what everyone was saying. Even though I kept nodding in the affirmative, she demanded that her daughter’s boyfriend translate things into English. He spoke almost no English. They told me that Yuri Ivanovich had worked for the KGB in Soviet days. We had walked past the former KGB headquarters that morning, an imposing red and yellow building with a hammer-and-sickle crest on the main street in Vladimir. Across the street is a monastery, which had also been KGB offices. On the grounds there is a large cross, dedicated to the victims of anti-religious repression committed in the 1930’s. There are around 30 names listed, all executed near the spot. Yuri Ivanovich was born in 1933, which means that he was only 20 years old at the time of Stalin’s death. The KGB of the post-Stalin era was still surveilling the population heavily, but the late night arrests, interrogations facilitated by rubber truncheons and thumbscrews, and basement executions—one round to the cerebral cortex— were mostly coming to an end. The dacha, or summer cottage, sits half way down a dirt road. It is not much from the front, just a vinyl sided house with farm-style gables. Entering through the gate, cherries dangled down just a bit too red to be eaten. A few roughly milled planks supported an overburdened apple tree. Behind the house an enormous garden was being tended by a central-Asian man. Beets, potatoes, onions, garlic, tomatoes, peppers, peas, dill, basil, cucumbers, radishes, horseradish, cabbages, strawberries, blueberries, raspberries, all growing in neatly tilled rows. Dima told me that the forecast called for rain. We all looked up to the sky, but the clouds were puffy and white and didn’t seem in the mood to rain on us. Pairs took turns playing table tennis beneath a veranda built in a log cabin style. Hanging in the rafters of the roof was a portrait of Lenin, on the wall a kitschy souvenir from Cuba with Che gazing out above some cartoonish palm trees. The two teenagers, Marina’s daughter and her boyfriend, were glued to one another and kept their conversation to private whispers. After the table tennis we went to swim. I waded out into the gently flowing river while everyone else watched from the beach. Thick aquatic grass grabbed my wrists as I swam. One of our host’s friends picked us up in his car along the path and drove us through the fields to a spot where two rivers met, creating a gentle whirlpool. Our new friend showed me a spot to jump from and I climbed up the steep embankment through a patch of stinging nettle (which, when you touch it, feels like a bee sting and leaves a rash). With a running start I jumped down into the river, 15 feet below. Back at the house, I laid down in a hammock and was taking a little nap when a little girl, Sonja, Yuri Ivanovich’s granddaughter, came up and started talking to me. The eight year old told me about how many times she had been to Turkey and Egypt (seven and four, respectively) and how she was learning English in first grade. She recited the numbers 1-5, dog, yes, no, mom, dad. After a while she went and fetched her pet rabbit and dangled the scared critter over me. I was drifting off a bit when I started hearing the sound of one of those small sparkling cone fireworks that comes in the big value packs and is never very impressive. I opened my eyes and saw Sonja looking off into the field. I stood up and saw a fire blazing at the foot of the neighbor’s property, the neighbors running to and from the house with buckets of water. Something about being in a foreign place dulls one’s responses. There is the feeling of being a spectator watching a bunch of actors playing out “Russia.” It is a combination of language barriers, cultural differences, and an unwillingness to stand out or do something foolish that creates this detachment. Anyway, I evidently succumbed to this as I stood rooted to the spot watching the neighbors scrambling to put the fire out. Sonja was much more decisive and ran to get her father who emerged a minute later with a fire extinguisher and a look of total indifference. The gardener came running behind him with a shovel. At this I snapped back into reality, grabbing a shovel and chasing after them. Sonja’s father sprayed the blaze down with the cloudy discharge and the rest of us took to stomping out the little licks of flame with shovels. The flaxen wild grass had been burned into a charcoaled mess. Yuri Ivanovich started laughing with the neighbors and told them that they “didn’t need to be smoking.” After fighting the blaze, Marina decided it was time for a bike ride. I was handed a clattery Soviet model from the 1950’s and we took off down a rutted path into the forest. Marina dismounted beside a grove of pines and started surveying the undergrowth. Before long she found what she was looking for and dug her hand into a patch of thick undergrowth. She surfaced with three small red berries and handed them to me. They were like strawberry miniatures and much sweeter, the kind of strawberry flavor in a lollipop except not artificial. We hunted around for the baby strawberries (they call them zemlyanika, which translates into something like “earth berry”) with mosquitoes swarming every step of the way. The trouble with these tiny berries was that they were so delicate that digging them out through the thick grass with one hand while smushing mosquitoes with the other often left nothing more than smashed pulp and juice. I picked a few handfuls of berries and killed a few handfuls of mosquitoes before we moved on to another patch of forest. Along the way Marina pointed out wild raspberries and some poisonous red berries. An asphalt road bisected the forest and led to a derelict campground with cabins and a dining hall. Marina explained that this had been a children’s camp during Soviet times and had recently been abandoned for lack of funds. She lamented the fact and began telling me that things in the country had really fallen apart after the collapse of the Soviet Union. At the house Yuri Ivanovich had been cooking and he was happy as a lark when he saw us coming back through the gate. He ran inside and emerged a minute later with a handful of Soviet-throwback ice cream bars. In the kitchen he danced around, talking about the tomatoes that were going into the borsch and telling us why potatoes in the city were lacking in vitamin content. Over dinner we talked light politics and Yuri Ivanovich insisted that I would become president, and that once I had done so I must not forget him! With time to kill before heading back to Suzdal to catch the bus, I sat drinking tea and watching Marina’s daughter do the dishes. Yuri Ivanovich drove us back to the bus station but we were a few minutes late and would have to wait for the next one. I took a walk with Dima around the old bus station complex and asked him what he thought about the Soviet Union, since he had been born after its fall. He told me that there were good things about the USSR, things he had heard from his parents, but that things weren’t so bad now. The last bus of the day pulled into the lot and everyone started loading on. By the time we got on all of the seats were taken and there were about fifteen other people behind us. Everyone crammed in with just enough room to stand in the aisle, lined up back to back. We stopped along the way to pick up more people who wedged themselves into the space between the steps and the door. I was encircled by people, all 98.6 degrees of their body heat radiating and all sorts of interesting personal odors issuing forth. The last rays of the day’s sun were beating through the un-tinted windows of the bus. The temperature inside was rising and sweat was already pouring down my lower back. Up front, the driver was lighting a cigarette. Russians have this really bizarre fear of being cold and it extends even into the summer months. Rolling down the road in this oven the Russians sat stonefaced with sweat beading at their brows. Finally, some guy next to me reaches up and opens the roof hatch to let some air in—I almost turn to thank him— but no sooner does it open than the whole bus has an absolute fit. An older man stands up and slams the hatch shut, yelling “if you wanted to open the windows, you should have taken a taxi not a bus.” There was a toddler on board and apparently they were all concerned that the breeze would be the death of him. The kid’s mother was visibly angry that someone would be so reckless with her child’s health. Of course, no one said a word to the bus driver whose cigarette smoke was wafting back over the heads of the passengers. Walking home from the bus station it started raining, and then it started pouring. Valentina’s leg was hurting so we had to walk slowly through the torrents that filled the streets as the water came rushing down the gradient towards our house.

Transnistria

Within a few seconds of pulling my camera out of its bag a suited man came out and walked swiftly towards us. He flashed an I.D. saying that he was presidential security, and that we could not film here. The presidential office is the most imposing building in Tiraspol, the capital of the breakaway state of Transdnistria, and a huge statue of Lenin in front is an obvious monument for tourists and journalists to take pictures of. “Ne nado,” we don’t need it, said all of the security people. We were confronted another five times in the next 4 days. Fleur and I had come into the break-away region that morning on a bus from Moldova. I had spilled juice in my seat, which made the ride a bit uncomfortable as it leaked through the towel and right through the hole in my pants (see former post). The border crossing was uneventful except for the fact that it existed. We had to get off the bus and go to the immigration office where the Transdnistrian officials rifled through our passports before deciding that we were all right. Men with AK-47’s manned a road block a hundred meters back, looking pretty bored as they watched buses and cars trickle in all day. We passed through the border town of Benderi, which is part of Transdnistria though it lies on the Moldovan side of the Dniester River. The river forms a natural border and basically demarcates the de-facto state. Coming in, I saw “Russia brings peace and stability” painted on an overpass. Russian ‘peace keeping troops’ stood in a grassy median at the foot of the bridge on the eastern bank of the river, assault rifles slung over their backs and a tank barely concealed beneath camouflage netting. In Moldova, they referred to these soldiers as “Russian occupiers.” From the bus station in Tiraspol we walked from street to street asking for an address that I had written on some scrap paper. In the shadow of the main hotel, whose rusting sign was waving violently in the wind, we found the building where our hostel was supposed to be. I rang the bell to apartment 47, 4th floor, and a small woman named Olia answered the door. She handed us a key and explained how to get to another apartment where we would be staying. It turns out that this was not a traditional hostel. Our apartment was one room with a small kitchen on the 5th floor of a building with no elevator. The toilet and bathtub were in separate rooms and the gas stove had to be lit with matches. We didn’t linger in the apartment, but grabbed our cameras and headed back down Pravda (Truth) street until it connected with 25 Oktyabrya (October) street, which led to the center of the city. The streets were spotless and free of garbage, and compared to Moldova the place was downright tidy. There was no graffiti on the walls (or it had been painted over). The street was quiet and mostly empty, with only the occasional Lada or trolley car bumbling rustily down the wide avenue. The beer kiosks that dot the landscape of Ukraine and Moldova were noticeably absent on the streets of Tiraspol as were the enormous advertisements for Western companies. Instead of commercial advertising there were patriotic slogans and symbols hanging from buildings or plastered up on billboards. Blazoned across the front of one was “Tiraspol is our favorite city!” The only thing decidedly western in the country is a chain of restaurants called Andy’s Pizza, which is an American style pizzeria. I never found out who owns it, but they must have spent a lot of time in the States. In the main square is a colossal statue of a man straddling a rearing horse, the founder of the city. To his right is an enormous sign with the national emblem of the PMR, Prednestrovian Moldavian Republic, in its center: a hammer and sickle surrounded by ears of grain and a bounty of fruits and vegetables, a red star emblazed above it all. Across the street is an Orthodox chapel with a WWII tank situated right outside so that it almost blocks out the golden dome, Za Rodinu (for the motherland) painted on its side. A cemetery for the soldiers who died during the conflict with Moldova, an eternal flame and a couple of life-size bronze statues occupies the area next to the chapel. Transdnistria, or Prednestrovia (Приднестровье) in Russian, broke away from the disintegrating Moldovan SR in 1990 and declared itself an independent Soviet Republic. Gorbachev struck this move down, but the area remained independent in practice, and remained so after the dissolution of the Soviet Union. There was a short war with Moldova in 1992 that ended in a stalemate after Russian troops, left over from Soviet days, took the side of the Transdnistrians. The country is internationally unrecognized though it maintains a de-facto independence, issuing its own currency, maintaining its own police force, postal service, and military. Presumably, it also has its own foreign service, which is active only in Abkhazia and South Ossetia, two break away regions of Georgia and fellow unrecognized de-facto states. There is an Abkhazian and South Ossetian embassy in Tiraspol which Fleur and I visited. I sat down with a few of the employees there and explained that I would soon be going to Georgia and would like to see their countries, but that it was complicated because I am an American. They were very friendly and tried their best to be helpful, advising me to talk to the foreign minister about getting permission. Of course, I knew it would be impossible for me to go to either of these “countries,” particularly since South Ossetia is still a war zone. Fleur and I met with a local guy named Andrei who co-authored a book about Transdnistria and who works at the state-run radio station, Radio Prednestrovia. He took us around on a tour of the city, which consisted of all of the war monuments and was on the whole not especially interesting. When we passed the Russian peacekeepers Andrei insisted that we not film them. He explained that we would have to have a long talk with “some serious guys” if we were caught. Andrei told us that he was interrogated for 5 hours by the KGB after a journalist who he was showing around took pictures of the wrong things. The KGB, which still goes by that name, is still very active in Transdnistria. I asked Andrei whether there was any opposition to Transdnistrian independence in the country. He said that there was none and told us about a 2006 referendum where voters were asked whether they wanted independence “with free association with Russia,” or wanted to rejoin with Moldova. 97.7% voted to remain independent, though the European Union and other Western bodies did not accept this figure. The population of Transnistria is around 32% Moldovan/Romanian, so the 97.7% figure seems outrageously high. When we asked why Transdnistrian independence was unrecognized, Andrei said it was because the West was “stupid.” When pressed harder, he explained that America and the EU had succumbed to Moldovan “fascist” propaganda. A new president, Evegeni Shevchuk, was elected in Transdnistria this year in an unexpected victory for a candidate who Moscow did not support. Close to our apartment there was a banner with his face printed next to the slogan Poryadok budet (There will be order)! I asked Andrei what he thought of the new president and he told me that he was a good guy and was doing a lot. He said that Shevchuk had negotiated an agreement with Moldova for railway cooperation. Shevchuk had also fired the former head of the KGB, who had held the position for the last 20 years. The next day we took a marshrutka, or mini-bus, to the city of Dubassari, which had seen the first casualties of the 1992 conflict. The road between Tiraspol and Dubassari cut through wide expanses of farmland, with only the occasional old-world farm hut or rusting Soviet grain silo interrupting the rolling green fields. We came to the center of Dubassari where another soldier’s cemetery sat next to another WWII monument and another eternal flame. Another big government building and another memorial to the war for independence stood on either side of another wide empty street. I had heard that there were some buildings in Dubassri where you can still see bullet holes in the façade from the 1992 conflict. Not knowing where else to start, I went up to some guys in camouflage and asked them what they knew about this and how to find it. They turned out to be Russian peacekeepers, who have a strong presence in this city, and after struggling a bit trying to explain what we wanted, they just offered to give us a ride. We hopped in the back of the car next to one of the soldiers, with the other two in front, and sped off through this town. All but one of the guys were from Russia and they were excited that I had been there and knew about their cities. We became fast friends and when they dropped us off we all shook hands, glad to have met one another. The memorial didn’t turn out to be much, so we made our way back downtown. I had heard about a hydro-electric plant operating in the city, so I asked a police officer how to get there. He was a young guy and seemed really excited that a Western foreigner was in his town and speaking to him in Russian. Walking along, he asked me what kind of Russian profanity I knew before showing us how to get to the plant. We took a taxi down to the river where the hydro-electric plant straddled the bridge with Transdnistria on one side and Moldova on the other. We got out of the taxi in front of a little police hut, where I asked if we could film. The officer didn’t answer but asked for our passports and registration instead. After we showed it to him, he said that we could go down to the station, but couldn’t film it. We walked past another roadblock that was guarded by a Russian peacekeeper holding an AK-47. A few meters ahead was another trailer with about 15 more peacekeepers and some kind of heavily armored vehicle with a big machine gun on front. I spoke with another peacekeeper and asked if we could film. He directed us to a part of the bridge that looked out onto the Dniester River and said that we could film there. Of course, we were not allowed to film the Hydro-electric station or the peacekeepers. The one peacekeeper who I was talking to kept watch over us as we filmed, though he wasn’t being aggressive or trying to hurry us. I asked him a few more times if we could film him and the guns, but he said no. However, he offered to take a picture of Fleur and me together. Slinging his AK-47 over his back, he held her camera up and got a few shots of us. The official currency used in Transdnistria is the Transdnistrian ruble. There are only two ATMs in the country and they only spit out American dollars and Russian rubles, which you then have to exchange at a bank. I was trying to demonstrate this on camera outside of the bank when a man in a suit came out, flashed an I.D. and asked what we were doing filming. I told him it was a student project about traveling and I was just trying to explain the currency situation. He got on the phone and told us to wait. We stood there silently, the security guy with his arms crossed over his tie, not unfriendly just dutiful. A minute later the guy from the phone call, also in a suit, shows up and I explain to him again what we are doing. “Ne Nado,” he said, and then in English “we have problem!” He demanded we delete the footage. At the main market in Tiraspol a blind man was playing the accordion at the bottom of the steps, singing Russian love songs, cloudy blue eyeballs emerging from beneath his closed eyelids when he hit the high notes. Browned and wrinkled women with headscarves came out from another century for the day to sell. They hunched on the ground with their wares lying out on blankets. No one was yelling. The sellers were friendly and mostly excited to have foreigners. One man seemed angry with me for not speaking Ukrainian, or for being foreign, I couldn’t tell. We asked some women who were selling nuts how life in the country was. With a tincture of sarcasm they said it was fabulous. I was filming some market scenes when some guy comes up and tells me he’s security and that I am not allowed to film here. The nut ladies hassled him a bit, but he just shrugged in a way that said, “I’m just doing my job.” Walking around town looking for interview with locals, I met one young guy named Alexander who told me that the new president was a good guy and was doing a lot. He said that Shevchuk had negotiated an agreement with Moldova for railway cooperation and had fired the former head of the KGB. He also told me that Transdnistria was the victim of Moldovan propaganda and was internationally unrecognized as a result. When I asked about internal opposition and calls to rejoin with Moldova, he said that there were none and that 97.7% of Transdnistrians supported independence. We met another young guy named Oleg in the main square who talked to us about his country. He told us that things had lightened up under President Shevchuk, particularly since the former head of the KGB had been fired. He said that up until a few months ago the KGB had been really paranoid about spying and had committed human rights abuses against suspected foreign spies. Oleg said that the KGB has grossly exaggerated the spying problem since in his own estimation “only about 2-3% of the foreign tourists were actually spying.” I had been corresponding with a girl named Velena who lives in Tiraspol. She and two of her friends came to our apartment. We sat on the floor and talked about their country. They explained to us that the West, which was just responding to Moldovan propaganda, was persecuting their country by not recognizing it. I asked about internal opposition in the country and why ethnic Moldovans, who make up 32% of the population in Transdnistria, don’t support reunification with Moldova. One of the guys, Roma, explained to me that the Moldovans had also fought in the civil war and that they too supported its independence. In fact, 97.7% supported Transdnistria’s independent status. The other guy, Dima, told me about Shevchuk’s firing of the former head of the KGB, who was wanted for crimes against humanity committed while working for the KGB in Lithuania during Soviet times. Fleur asked how this kind of guy could have held this position for 20 years if he was so bad? Dima explained that “all politicians are criminals.” One of them mentioned Shevchuk’s success in negotiating a deal with Moldova that would open up railway connections between the two countries. The other two chimed in at this, saying that it was a great accomplishment. I asked whether, if given the choice, they would rather Transdnistria be absorbed into Russia—like a kind of exclave, another Kaliningrad— or reunited with Romania? Roma and Velena immediately said “join with Russia.” Dima said Moldova. The other two gave him sharp looks. Roma, with an edge in his voice, asked “why?!” Dima was quiet. The next day at the train station we were waiting for our bus to arrive to take us to Odessa. Fleur had gone off to get something to eat and so I was sitting on the curb and decided to take a picture of a brick smokestack and some ugly Soviet building. I took a quick shot. A man came up and told me not to photograph here. Crossing the border back into Ukraine, I was called off of the bus by the Transdnistrian border guards who proceeded to tell me that my crossing into Ukraine was not legal since I did not have an exit stamp from Moldova. Of course, when crossing into Transdnistria you do not get an exit stamp from Moldova, since it is considered their territory. I told him that I was now exiting Moldova but he said that Moldova was 80 kilometers in the other direction. I had read about this kind intimidation at the borders, which is just an attempt to get a bribe, so I told the guard that I knew for sure that I was exiting legally. After repeating that it was illegal once again, he dismissed me. That morning we had returned the apartment key to Olia. She stood in the doorway still in her nightgown as we thanked her and told her what a good time we’d had. I started telling her that I had been making a short film about the country and that Fleur would be writing a travel piece. A worried look flashed momentarily across Olia’s face. Regaining her smile, she told us just not to say anything bad about the country because we were registered here under her name and in her apartment. She said that she didn’t want anyone to come knocking on her door.